RAVEN. 
167 
The Moor of Venice says; 
“ It comes o’er my memory. 
As doth the Raven o’er the infected house, 
Boding to all.”* 
The last quotation alludes to the supposed habit of this bird’s 
flying over those houses which contain the sick, whose dissolu- 
tion is at hand, and thereby announced. Thus Marlowe, in the 
Jew of Malta, as cited by Malone: 
“ The sad presaging Raven tolls 
The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak. 
And in the shadow of the silent night 
Doth shake contagion from her sable wing.” 
But it is the province of philosophy to dispel those illusions 
which bewilder the mind, by pointing out the simple truths 
which Nature has been at no pains to conceal, but which the 
folly of mankind has shrouded in all the obscurity of mystery. 
The Raven is a general inhabitant of the United States, but 
is more common in the interior. On the lakes, and particularly 
in the neighbourhood of the Falls of the river Niagara, they 
are numerous; and it is a remarkable fact, that where they so 
abound, the Common Crow, C. corone, seldom makes its ap- 
pearance; being intimidated, it is conjectured, by the superior 
size and strength of the former, or by an antipathy which the 
two species manifest towards each other. This I had an oppor- 
tunity of observing myself, in a journey during the months of 
August and September, along the lakes Erie and Ontario. The 
Ravens were seen every day, prowling about in search of the 
dead fish, which the waves are continually casting ashore, and 
which afibrd them an abundance of a favourite food; but I did 
not see or hear a single Crow within several miles of the lakes; 
and but very few through the whole of the Gennesee country. 
The food of this species is dead animal matter of all kinds. 
Othello, act iv,^ scene 1, 
